Virtually every mature KM program has or wants a social collaboration aspect, via SharePoint, Yammer, a wiki, or any one of the myriad open source or inexpensive proprietary and public social networking sites. Employees want to connect as easily at the office as they do in their personal life for a quick exchange, to follow people they like, and to create a personal brand.

Your brain is the most powerful knowledge management tool you have. Yet you may know more about designing a community of practice than capitalizing on how your brain works. Your brain is worth understanding if you are into KM: it’s the original information processer; the unrivaled content curator; and the source of inspiration, motivation, and collaboration.

Cognitive computing will be as disruptive to organizations in the next decade as social media was in the last. Maybe more.

Cognitive computing, along with its engines machine learning and predictive analytics, will radically transform the way we interact with content and each other in our digital lives. Content management, collaboration and the entire search experience will change and become more personal, more customized, and more automated.

We all make some bad decisions: small ones, like buying those adorable shoes that were on sale but hurt your feet. Or colossal ones, like taking a bad job, investing in a doomed start-up or doomed-to-fail product, marrying someone obviously incompatible or invading a country.

Why do smart people make dumb decisions?

Well, I happen to believe that the confirmation bias is often the culprit and pretty much at the root of many bad decisions and most human nearsightedness and meanness. It is why we get blindsided when the clues were there all along.

In November 2015, APQC hosted a two-day MENA Knowledge Management Conference in Dubai, bringing high-caliber speakers from APQC’s membership to share their experiences and expertise with an eager international audience from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

As the end of the year approaches, I have been reflecting on the concept of wisdom. Supposedly wisdom results from knowledge and experience. What are the characteristics of wise leaders? Here is what I think is the #1 characteristic:

Let me alert you to a fascinating interview I did with Elizabeth Swan on how people learn and the implications for knowledge management, innovation, and accelerating the rate of organizational learning. The conversation started because we discovered that we both enjoyed the same book, How We Learn by Benedict Carey of the New York Times.

Like many of you, as the weather cools and the summer fades, APQC is knee-deep in strategic planning. Since APQC has access to many best practices, we try to follow them. One is to conduct a premortem on planned investments, a technique borrowed from project planning, in which one attempts to imagine what could go wrong and decide how to avoid or mitigate those risks. Doesn’t this go against the socially acceptable stance of being an optimist?

I know I am not Steve Jobs. But I am a pretty good version of myself. According to Nick Tasler, change management consultant and keynote speaker at APQC's upcoming 2015 Process Conference, that might be ok.